We haight to say it, Frisco, but ...

Think of the Sunset Strip these days, and images of slick nightclubs and tourists come to mind. Now rewind to 1966, when the Strip was the city’s creative heart and soul -- alive with hot rods and hipsters and bands that would change the course of rock ‘n’ roll.

The Bay Area and New York have long been credited with ushering in the hippie era, but well before the Monterey Pop Festival or Woodstock, now-defunct clubs like the Trip, Sea Witch and Galaxy were playing the Doors, the Byrds and Frank Zappa.

“Everything associated with San Francisco’s psychedelic history actually started in L.A.,” says Domenic Priore, historian and host of tonight’s “Sunset Strip 1966,” a narrated slide show featuring 85 photos from 1965 and 1966 set to an era-appropriate soundtrack.

“We were the center. The Sunset Strip was the mecca for this whole original agent of social change.”

Presented by the L.A. Conservancy’s Modern Committee, the slide show is the byproduct of photos compiled for Priore’s coming book “Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Last Stand in Hollywood.” They chronicle the people and places that shaped the ‘60s scene and will be shown at a venue that foreshadowed another lasting trend -- a former vegetarian eatery known as the Aware Inn, now Jaxx restaurant.

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-- Susan Carpenter

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“Sunset Strip 1966,” Jaxx, 8828 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, 7 p.m. today, free, (213) 623-2489